Sorry, gotta cancel that one. It's been so long since I last used it, I forgot that I successfully installed the Creator's Update on it a few months ago, and just updated it to the 1703 June cumulative update pack. Oh well, it's still quite an underpowered piece of hardware. For instance, it has 1GB of RAM, so it likes to run out of memory constantly.

Reminds me of the Windows 7 Starter Netbook days. Where having Norton installed would cause a "out of system memory" message and upgrading to 2gb led to a slightly less seen "cpu usage high" message instead.

I picked this up ~7 years ago out of curiosity. Was a really mediocre laptop... Keyboard was cheap feeling+mushy, the fans were hairdryer-tier loud, the screen's backlight was flickering at the touch due to a loose cable (albeit that's maybe the fault of the previous owner), etc. I still have the 13-disc recovery CD set; not entirely sure what to do with it.

The other HPs in this thread have lots more charm than this thing could ever have.

HP Vectra XU6/150 Pentium Pro. Pics were taken the day I picked it up in 2015 (it was being tossed out), still haven't cleaned it up properly and taken a nice pic. Bought and installed a second PPro 150 and stock heatsink, and picked up a similar era HP keyboard. Plan to try and max out the RAM and run NT4 on it, not sure what it has installed on it now (if anything).

It came with some cool hardware - dual Xeons with hyperthreading, an eVGA GeForce 7600GT AGP, a 10 000 RPM 36GB SCSI drive, and 4 gigs of ECC DDR1 with this weird double-stacked chip arrangement.

The case can be used in a desktop or tower orientation by rotating the drive bays 90 degrees - very clever.

Fired it up and it did boot to the BIOS (note - removed three RAM sticks for testing, they all seemed to work though), but I couldn't get the HDD to spin up at all. The setup on these is this fantastically detailed DOS-style menu system.

EVERY SINGLE capacitor on the motherboard looked like these. Frankly I'm shocked it even powered on, let alone booted to the CMOS setup in an intelegible way. They were even on the video card (which incidentally *was* dead, I swapped it out for testing above.)

So naturally I stripped it for parts. It yielded me some choice goods. The 2.8GHz Xeons are a great score for my currently-2.4GHz Asus PC-DL rig, those huge passive coolers will be a nice improvement and I think I can use the RAM in it too.

Here's everything that was left after all was said and done. (I also ended up tossing the dead HDD and one of the DVD drives which had a broken belt.) Note that I did save the video card after all; there aren't many caps to replace and they're easily accessible. A 512MB AGP card is rare enough that I'm willing to give a shot at getting it going again.

Sadly that cool dual-orientation case was in a really sorry state - filthy, with a lot of dented panels and broken plastic bits. It also weighed WAY more than it should have for its size - a good 10-12kg at least, which is about 8kg more than I felt like dealing with. It went back in the bin. Can't save everything, but at least some of this one will live on.

JidaiGeki wrote:HP Vectra XU6/150 Pentium Pro. Pics were taken the day I picked it up in 2015 (it was being tossed out), still haven't cleaned it up properly and taken a nice pic. Bought and installed a second PPro 150 and stock heatsink, and picked up a similar era HP keyboard. Plan to try and max out the RAM and run NT4 on it, not sure what it has installed on it now (if anything).